Ananas Uses eLogii to Build a Leading Last Mile Delivery Operation

“I looked at the leading solutions in the world and I couldn’t find in any of the other solutions the flexibility that I find in eLogii. On top of that, the flexibility, the customer support and the attention that you get from the team makes the whole difference to your business” - Felipe Alves - COO

Background

Ananas is a subsidiary of Delta Holdings, a leading diversified holding company with revenues in excess of €500m. Ananas is building a regional platform for online commerce - initially targeting the Serbian market and expanding into other markets of former Yugoslavia as well as Albania. Parent group Delta Holdings has committed €100m in investments to the Ananas platform development over the next five years.

 Ananas is distinguished by an extremely large assortment of goods across several categories, in cooperation with thousands of suppliers and merchants, and also by delivering a completely innovative and new user experience to the region’s customers.

The problem

Ananas like most businesses have the vast majority of their costs concentrated in the last mile and as a result, driving efficiency in the last mile is critical to strong unit economics. 

 Beyond efficiency, Ananas needed to provide an unparalleled customer experience including tracking, live updates, ratings and the ability to change time and day of deliveries. Before eLogii, and having reviewed a number of leading solutions in the market, finding a combination of these in one single solution had proven very challenging. 

 Keeping call center costs to a minimum (and avoiding the “where is my order?” call) was critical to Ananas and at early launch they had realized that the average number of calls per order was higher than desired. 

 Additionally, Ananas needed to have a solution that plugged into their order management system and also into their warehouse management system. Furthermore, the chosen solution also had to plug into their proprietary in-house built carrier allocation engine (as their internal last mile would be seen effectively as a carrier for the purposes of selecting the best ‘mode’ of delivery for the particular job in question).

The solution

With eLogii Ananas gained a solution that solved all of their challenges but also provided a number of opportunities to enhance customer value and build on top of their already-unique and powerful proposition.

 Some of the benefits that Ananas gained from the eLogii solution almost immediately were as follows:

• Automated optimisation – with eLogii, manually planning routes instantly became a thing of the past. Orders were optimised in a single click in a centralised fashion across all of Ananas’ fulfilment centres and depots
  
  
  
  
• Barcode Scanning  - barcode scanning is a key part of the workflow at Ananas and is an intrinsic part of what happens in the warehouse and fulfilment centres. With eLogii barcodes can be scanned from any iOS and Android device, including Zebra scanners which eLogii has a native integration with
  
  
  
  
• Complete and customisable communications – via eLogii Ananas is able to at various stages of the order lifecycle communicate with customers via SMS, email and data communications. For example, when the order is enroute, arrived, completed etc. The template can be fully customisable (eLogii provides access to the HTML of the templates)
  
  
  
  
• Cash on delivery workflow – Ananas required the ability to do cash on delivery reconciliation via the eLogii driver app (for example ensuring that the correct amount of cash has been collected etc.). eLogii supports a cash on delivery workflow out of the box as a configurable setting
• Full track and trace via a totally configurable and customisable customer tracking experience – customers are totally wowed by the experience they got when their order is on the way as a result of the amazing tracking powered by eLogii. For example, customers were able to get ETAs (initially in a window, but subsequently with increasing accuracy as their delivery slot got closer by)
  
  
  
  
• Full integration with all their business systems - with eLogii’s class-leading API, Ananas was able to integrate with all their business systems, including ERP, WMS and carrier management solutions. Integration allowed for seamless exchange of data between systems without manual work and effort and data to remain up to date across all systems in real-time
• Allowing customers to postpone delivery / change delivery etc. - Ananas wanted to provide a very unique experience which was to allow customers to say “I won’t be in then, I want to change by delivery time / slot to another one”. Instead of that coming via the call center, or via an email from the customer, Ananas allowed customer via eLogii’s out of the box ‘re schedule’ functionality to build this into the customer portal/tracking page enabling customers to make these edits for themselves
  
  

Additionally, Ananas gained phenomenal insight into their operations via eLogii’s class-leading analytics which enabled them to closely track performance, revenue, costs as well as service levels to customers. With these insights, Ananas were able to at a glance see the best performing delivery people as well as being able to refine their proposition in terms of what was resonating most with consumers in different parts of the country.

The results

• Call center load minimized by close to 50%
• Double digit operational savings within months
• Unparalleled customer satisfaction as a result of live information, tracking etc.
• Average ‘internal calls per order’ dropped by approximately 25% as a result of clear visibility over each and every order

“eLogii had everything that we needed and envisioned in terms of functionality we needed to operate in the last mile” - Felipe Alves, COO

Felipe goes on to explain: 

“The amazing way to see where the driver is, when the driver is going to come, the range of time that the driver is going to come to their house and then when it is closer to that the specific estimated time of arrival transforms completely the customer experience for the better. It not only makes the customer happier, but also reduces my call center costs. Today I do not have calls anymore from customers asking “where is my package?”